Momo Kodama’s debut recording for ECM La Vallée des Cloches enchants a reviewer from the American West Coast

French music of the 20th century can be traced back to Debussy - except for the strain that stems from Ravel. Pianist Momo Kodama's entrancing new disc offers a glimpse of that second lineage, in performances that boast an apt combination of clarity and insinuation. She begins with Ravel's ‘Miroirs’, that fecund repository of Impressionist ideas and techniques, and then traces its influence through two later works, the brief and wonderfully evocative ‘Rain Tree Sketch’ by Toru Takemitsu (a French composer in all but actual biography) and Olivier Messiaen's ‘La fauvette des jardins.’ The Messiaen, a rarely performed late work infused (naturally) with bird calls, is a revelatory demonstration of how the distinctive figurations and voicings of Ravel's piano writing seep through nearly a century's worth of elaboration to surface in a difference harmonic and formal context. But the disc is worth hearing even if only for Kodama's crisp, pointed and sensuous playing of ‘Miroirs,’ a performance both elegant and elusive.Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle

Here, for a prodution of Giorgios Cheimonas’ modern greek adaption of Euripides’ ‘Medea’ is her gorgeously ritualistic musical journey through ‘Euripides’ bleak world of poetry’ [...] Karaindrou freely admits that its brooding, droning intensity wouldn’t necessarily cohere as drama on disc without producer Eicher reshaping it to do so. The result is quite beautiful and not much like any other music you name.J.S., Buffalo News

This is music created for the Medea production put on by stage director Antonis Antypas, as performed at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. The Medea enacted there is Giorgos Cheimonas' adaptation from the original Euripides version of the play. Musically it has a timeless, exotic quality. Eleni Karaindrou utilizes a 15-member chorus; Eleni herself effectively contributes a solo part. Plus there is an 8-member chamber group with strong Greek and Eastern Mediterranean associations. The ensemble consists of three clarinets, ney, a player of the Constantinople lute (sounding much like an oud) and lyra, then cello, the santour, and the bendir.With these means Ms. Karaindrou creates a music of great evocative beauty, with its ancient scales and traditional instruments providing sound color and spatial punctuation, the vocals from chorus and soloists extending the sound and all-in-all creating a through-composed modern ambient pomo sort of work that is very identifiably Karaindrou-esque. Even in the purely instrumental passages the reflective, haunting melodiousness of Karaindrou comes through. It sounds less like ‘authentic’ ancient Greek-Eastern Mediterranean music as the idea of that as filtered by an ‘authentic’ Eleni Karaindrou sensibility. And it is one of her very strongest works at that. The performances are excellent, the sound all you'd expect from ECMGrego Applegate, Gapplegate Music Review

All About Jazz reviews the historical albums Miroslav Vitous Group and Five Years Later by Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie, now available as CD and as high resolution download, cut from the original analogue master

In exploring a multiplicity of reference points, from the neo-classical leanings of the closing ‘Eagle,’ where Vitous' warm arco blends with Surman's gently searching bass clarinet, to the dark-hued cinematics of "Sleeping Beauty" and swinging but temporally shifting ‘Gears,’ where Vitous delivers one of his most impressive pizzicato solos of the set, Miroslav Vitous Group is unequivocally a jazz record, but one whose multiplicity of stylistic touchstones also makes it a long overdue release that is, indeed, informed by all kinds of music. And it's good, too—exceptionally good, in fact.

Like its predecessor, Five Years Later is split between individual compositions and collective improvisation, though this time a full 23 minutes of the album's 50-minute run time is devoted to spontaneous creation. The composed music is wonderful, with Towner's knotty but intrinsically lyrical ‘The Juggler's Etude’ one of his most memorable compositions to this day and ‘Caminata’ a miniature of singular melancholic beauty. The contrasting light and dark of Abercrombie's ‘Child's Play’ and more dramatic ebb and flow of ‘Isla’ are further evidence of the guitarist's compositional evolution, in just a few short years. But it's the free improvisations that reveal just how much Towner and Abercrombie's shared language and innate chemistry had evolved—the result of growth in their own separate projects and with more time spent on the road together. [...]some of the finest, most intuitive and intimately inspired dual-guitar music in the history of jazz.John Kelman, All About Jazz